What is a tea party?

MARY LOU LINEBERGER AND JANE KENNY

Wednesday

Sep 21, 2011 at 12:16 AM

On a stormy Friday evening in February 2010 an overflow crowd showed up for our first tea party meeting. The previous week we had placed a small news item in Bluffton Today announcing a meeting to organize a tea party group in the Bluffton area. We never expected such a huge response – the free meeting room we had obtained wasn’t big enough to hold all the people.

Two months later we held our first rally on April 15 and more than 2,200 people attended. Today, the Bluffton tea party Patriots organization continues to grow … and, according to national news reports, we’re part of a movement that comprises millions of Americans just like us.

Exactly what is the phenomenon called the tea party? It’s been characterized as political, radical, extreme, racial, terrorist and evil. From our perspective, it is none of those things. We’re just ordinary American citizens who are deeply concerned about the direction of our dear country. The tea party is a unique grassroots phenomenon.

But why is it happening at this time? Simply, it is a backlash reaction to being ignored. Tea party groups started because hardworking, tax-paying Americans are frustrated. From the president on down, elected officials who are supposed to represent us are no longer listening to us. Following the 2008 election the will of the people was flagrantly dismissed by the president and the congress as a minor annoyance. Laws are passed in opposition to the will of the American people…rules, regulations and intrusions on our Liberty are forced on us. That’s unacceptable in a representative democratic republic.

Older American protesters in tea party groups like ours have been described as selfish, angry, gray-haired liars, fear mongers, crazy nuts and disrespectful. Yet, we are the ones who can remember a time when Americans had and appreciated their freedoms. We remember getting a paycheck that had us taking home most of the money we earned. We remember a time when there were no sales taxes or government-imposed hidden taxes, fees and regulations on nearly everything. American senior citizens remember a time when the free enterprise system was indeed free — not controlled by heavy-handed government regulation, government-created monopolies and even government-owned business. We remember a frugal and limited government that promoted opportunities for the largest and most prosperous middle class in the world. We enjoyed the fruits of our labors. We lived within our means. To a proud and self-reliant People, government handouts were anathema. We desperately want an America like that for our children and grandchildren.

George Washington famously said, “The power under the Constitution will always be in the People.” We see that power playing out now in the tea party movement. Citizens show up at rallies carrying hand-made signs to express messages we want to send to our elected representatives. We want to be heard; we want our government to work for us again. Typically, ordinary citizens are the featured speakers at tea party rallies, not politicians. At our Tax Day rally in Bluffton, speakers included a teacher, carpenter, physician and a minister … all proudly carried the same title: “Citizen of the United States of America.” A few members of the South Carolina state legislature were in attendance and they were respected for their willingness to sit among the people and listen to what we had to say. Contrary to what we hear in the media, tea party groups foster mutually-respectful relationships between elected officials and the people they represent.

Recently, a congresswoman from Florida called the tea party “the enemy.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. In a self-governing nation, citizens have a responsibility to be involved. American citizens are not the enemy of the country … we ARE the country! Because we understand and cherish the concept of a democratic republic, we can no longer stay at home and watch as a federal bureaucracy transforms us into democratic socialism.

Tea party citizens want to preserve the republic. Our goal is to restore the Constitutional principles of: Limited government, fiscal responsibility and free markets. We believe we can achieve these goals through electoral (not political) activism. And that’s as is should be. With each successive election, we will work to elect like-minded individuals to represent us. We are citizens, patriots, ordinary Americans working to restore the principles of Liberty for future generations.

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